Category Archives: Current Events, Politics, All That Jazz

Perhaps you’re aware of the various “false flag” theories that mass shootings as in Sandy Hook and Parkland never happened. Of course you are, you’re on the internet enough to have found this little authorpage and blog.

These conspiracy theorists compare pictures from different mass shootings and disasters, looking for similarities in people. When they find someone who sorta looks like someone else, they consult the magic chemtrail crystal ball and, lo and behold, it PROVES IT’S THE SAME PERSON IN A THINLY VEILED DISGUISE.

Their false flag crisis actor theory depends upon the fact that, like snowflakes, no two humans look at all like each other. Ever.

Which brings us to Elvis performer and lookalike Donny Edwards, pictured above in full regalia.

BUT WE KNOW TWO PEOPLE CANNOT LOOK ALIKE.

So he must be Real Elvis, preserved in unaging immortality perhaps by turning the mind control drug exuded by venomous vampires called fluoride against itself. Ha! TAKE THAT, SECRET GLOBALIST ARMY TUNNELING UNDER THE OCEAN FROM CHINA AND EUROPE TO TAKE OVER THE UNITED STATES IN THE NAME OF THE REPTILE ALIEN CONTROLLED UNITED NATIONS!

So, yeah. Telepathy is kinda already a thing, sort of. We just haven’t noticed it and it’s really not the province of individual humans, even though it sure is good at reading our individual minds, and getting better at it every passing day.

I’m going to write about this in more detail on my Patreon next week (I’m aiming for Tuesday (Feb 20th)), but here’s the basic premise for you to think about:

A large proportion of the world is online.

A HUGE proportion of the first world is online.

Our buying, browsing, app, and social media habits are recorded, monitored, and analyzed by dozens upon dozens of different companies. Perhaps even our conversations if they’re in range of a smartphone, tablet, or even PC microphone.

This info can be used to build a SCARY accurate picture of who we are, what we think, and what we want.

This info and these analyses are not centralized, limiting their effectiveness and application.

…seem to be a thing fated to happen. We’re in the midst of getting self-driving cars. We’re about to get a practical exoskeleton. It’s a natural! Who doesn’t want to walk to the store half an hour away while taking a nap or screwing around on your smartphone?

2052: police drones are empowered to query medical data from personal exoskeletons to detect when users are stationary and sleeping (or walking while sleeping) for long periods, so they can be ticketed for loitering as part of anti-homeless measures.https://t.co/oBDMGyZ2Ex

I’m not sure which way the spread of self-driving car technology is going to go, but I see three basic options.

Option one: The Epic Fail.

In this scenario self-driving cars grow in popularity and start becoming common. Some major cities start banning manual-drive cars from major pedestrian malls in their city centers. Everything’s going great!

And then, BAM! A widespread software glitch, virus, or cyberattack strikes a large number of cars. Maybe it’s a given make or model of car, or every car running a certain app or receiving a certain update or patch. Thousands of cars crash, either physically, in the software sense, or both. Thousands of people are hurt in the space of hours, or even minutes. Hundreds of people die. Emergency rooms and ambulance services are overwhelmed. Video of hospitals performing triage in parking lots and stacked body bags hits the news. Victims appear on talk shows and media broadcasts.

There’s a huge anti-self-driving public outcry. Politicians pass laws to restrict the hell out of self-driving car technology. Carmakers pull back on producing them. It takes a century or two for the public to even consider allowing self-driving cars again, and even longer for laws restricting them to be withdrawn — if they ever are.

Option Two: City Drivers.

Self-driving cars become a little like hunting: mostly a rural thing, and a point of pride for many rural folks to distinguish themselves from “soft” urban types. Small towns and unincorporated areas may allow self-driving vehicles, but social pressure causes many people living in these areas to avoid them. The demand this preserves for manual-drive cars keeps carmakers supplying them and prevents the areas that favor them from passing laws restricting them.

At the same time, larger towns and cities do restrict manual-drive cars, barring them from downtown areas at least. Larger cities ban manual driving within city limits.

This division creates additional barriers and friction between rural and urban areas — it becomes more difficult for someone living and driving in one to visit the other — and as urban areas continue to grow, rural unrest and dissatisfaction with government and city people grows. Potentially, this may fuel separatism and worse political division of Americans than currently exists, and fuel similar social conflict in other nations as well.

Option three: Self-Driving Cars Take Over

In this scenario, self-driving car technology continues to develop quickly and by the time people born in the 2010s grow up self-driving cars dominate the roads. A decade after that, so many areas, including whole counties and even states, outlaw manual driving that even if you could find a manual car to buy there’s be barely anywhere to drive it. Manual-drive cars are only popular in racing sports and on closed tracks and private property as a rich person’s hobby.

The 20 years of the switchover creates a situation in which there are few of the older cars that the poor rely on for transportation available to buy. Self-driving technology replaces the cars of the poor with pay-per-ride apps, which are no more expensive as long as the poor choose to use them seldom and for short distances at non-peak periods. The availability of pay-per-ride self-drivers disrupts public transportation systems with low ridership; many collapse or contract. Some poor and working-class people are forced out of rural areas due to the greater reliance on people owning their own transportation in those areas, leading to an increase in the rural-to-city population shift.

By the time older self-driving cars are available for the poor to buy at low cost, the new social norm is set and few people buy those cars, distrusting the cost of upkeep and relatively large outlay.

It’s a relative good for most, but not for the bottom ten percent of income earners.

So. There are the major options as I see them. Got another idea? Let me know in the comments. 🙂

(This post appeared a week earlier on my Patreon page — join me and see most of my work early, plus you can get ebooks, for free, before I release them even if I’m charging for them when they go public, and even signed copies of anything I publish hard copy of at higher patronage levels!)

of course, it will only take upload time for major media sources to add 4,000 hours of content.So, bots & major media production companies.@YouTube is entirely ditching small creators. They don't want regular people anymore."Thanks for making us. NOW GET OUT, DIRTY PEASANTS." https://t.co/v92d0pMXGn

That’s the gist of it. Unless you’re producing mass content via bot or a major media company with tons of material to upload, you can no longer monetize your YouTube channel without a bare minimum of 2 years of 80+ hour weeks or 5 years of full-time work making videos.

They just locked out the creators who made YouTube a thing. Now it’s just a network like ABC, only with much crappier standards.

I’ve seen, and you’ve probably seen, a certain amount of “alt-right” and company (social injustice warriors, as I think of them) complaining about the SUDDEN APPEARANCE of the above in the Star Wars universe.

Which might lead you to wonder if any of the complainers actually watched any Star Wars anything (much less any of the novels).

–Politics: baked right into the very core of Star Wars. Hello, a republic grown complacent and clogged with bureaucracy and clinging to tradition is upended by a genocidal authoritarian dictatorship, giving rise to a resistance movement… yeah. Politics, man.

–Strong women: Look, Leia was pretty badass even back in the first movie. She only got tougher as things went along. And now, of course, Carrie Fisher has become more powerful than you could imagine. So, yeah. Not a shock if more tough women are showing up.

–POC: A weakness of the Star Wars movies in the beginning, and a shame Lando Calrissian was the only significant nod to the existence of people other than Caucasians in the beginning — a lack made even more obvious by the huge diversity of aliens running around. Frankly, it’s good to see more human diversity in more recent movies.

–LGBTQ: Basically, see above (though the aliens observation, already a minor side-point of my perception, grows strained here as I’m not sure I remember a lot of alien sexuality showing up either). Cheers to more human diversity. We’ve got lots of it on only one planet, and how many planets are humans on in the Star Wars universe? Yeah.

Look, provincial and insular people can yearn for provinciality and insularism all they want, but rapid and relatively cheap travel plus the instant worldwide multimedia communication environment of the internet will inevitably keep drawing our world together and exposing all of us to each others’ diverse everything. Diversity isn’t some weird left-wing fetish, it’s a FACT OF LIFE.

So, if someone (hello, social injustice warriors) wants to cling to the past: keep clinging, or alternately stop and admit the plain fact that life is change and change will keep happening whether you rage against it or tolerate it or accept it or embrace it. I know of those four options, embracing is by far the most positive and fun.

The “best” angry clingers could accomplish is dragging humanity back into a primitive insular xenophobic barbarity we haven’t even managed to fully exit yet. We’re a half-birthed civilization. Don’t let the technology fool you. The clingers (Klingons? Wrong universe, but still…) say society has gone to far, but it hasn’t gone far enough yet. Being born is the hardest part. Well, until death, but that needn’t come for humanity for a long time if we get our butts off this one little planet… but that’s another rant and one I come back to often.

Anyhow, angry Klingons: let go of your anger. That way leads to the Dark Side and a big smelly pile of Sith (seriously, that name, geez).

No, this isn’t Norfolk, Virginia where I live. This is Raleigh, North Carolina a relatively short drive south, a few years ago. But we react to snow about the same way around here. Our AT-ATs are a touch smaller, though.

So today (Wednesday the 3rd of this brave new world of 2018) I had a mental healthcare appointment to keep (no emergencies — in fact, I’ve been feeling better than I have for the past 3 or 4 years). I first set up these appointments when the family car was working, but because I am a prescient prophet capable of seeing that driving 20 year old cheap beater cars means we’ll be carless from time to time when one dies, I chose a practice in walking distance.

And of course it’s winter when the car chooses to die, the jerky little bastard. And of course the Earth’s hat of cold air has lately slipped rakishly to the side and we’re under all that fine polar air right now while the precious icecap continues melting in frickin January.

But the walk isn’t so bad because it’s over freezing unlike the walk I had to take for yesterday’s appointment, and the legacy of a Wisconsin childhood is knowing how to dress for cold. Only my cane hand gets truly cold, and maybe my nose.

My appointment was on one side of a rectangular route with one of the two grocery stores in walking distance on the other side of it on the way home, so instead of taking the shorter route back home I figured I’d stop by the store as long as I was already walking and pick up a few odds and ends like some apples and pears for the children who, I am very happy to report, can chow fresh fruit like champions and do at every opportunity. Yay, nutrition!

I wasn’t planning on picking up enough things to justify taking along the collapsible cart I recently bought thanks to my Patreon patrons, so I brought an empty backpack. All good. Planning ahead.

But what I did not plan on — and I should have known better given my past experience as a manager in the grocery biz — was the forecast of 8-12 inches of snow in the forecast for tonight (there’s a bit less than an inch on the ground as I type this, and the snow is beginning to come down again after taking a break for nightfall) and what it would mean for my mission.

In Norfolk, Virginia where close proximity to the ocean gentles the temperatures, this is a MASSIVE BLIZZARD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE OH GOD.

The grocery store was clotted with swarms of half-crazed customers. Like, a no shopping carts available, I got one of the last 6 or 7 handbaskets swarm of shoppers — and at that point, not a single snowflake had fallen yet.

Ew, a handbasket. I don’t like using them anymore, because they unbalance me due to my limp and bone-on-bone hip, and I already limp heavily enough even with the cane thankyouverymuch.

I almost decided to say screw it and head home. But, the kids want apples. And the wife’s upset tummy craves full-sugar Coca Cola (which horrifies me; as my grandma’s good little boy I cleave to her teaching that 7-Up is the magic tonic that soothes all ills).

So I shop.

Weather panics are weird.

Some of it is predictable. Half the bread aisle is blown out, as it always is when bad weather threatens. Apparently there’s something about blizzards and hurricanes and nor’easters that makes people crave sandwiches and toast.

The bottled water is also half blown out. Because if anything is scarce during a blizzard, it’s water which is LAYING ALL OVER THE GROUND A FOOT THICK JUST SHOVEL A FEW DRINKS INTO A BUCKET AND BRING IT IN TO THAW FER CRISSAKE. Also, since when does a blizzard knock out the water supply? Your pipes shouldn’t be freezing, because you should be running your water if it’s that damn cold. And the snow will insulate the crawlspace under your home. It’ll actually be warmer under there than it has the last 3 or 4 nights with the cold snap.

And, this is the one that really gets me, and I’ve seen it before (and it’s weirder than anything else I’ve seen in a storm except the guy who bought a whole cart full of frozen dinners because he was afraid the hurricane would knock out his electricity, or the woman who bought two dozen (!!) gallons of milk, also in the teeth of an approaching hurricane. WTF!) — the meat case is also half blown out. The hamburger is GONE. And three customers are standing next to the empty hamburger shelf asking each other if there’s any more hamburger anywhere else and when will the butcher bring out more hamburger?

People, if the blizzard comes and knocks out your power, I assume some of you have gas stoves. But not all of you! Are you planning on crouching in your dark living room gnawing a pack of raw hamburger like Gollum gnawing a fish? Do you figure hamburger will cook itself up if you toss it into one of the snowdrifts in your front yard?

Is there something about a snowstorm that demands you start a cookout?

Is there some theory I’ve never heard of that says you can save yourself from freezing to death if your home is heatless by covering yourself with ground beef?

Or maybe @AjitPaiFCC@FCC@GOP@Verizon already know and those fake comments are part of a coordinated astroturfing effort to hand the internet into the control of megacorporations — for nothing, just as a gift because they're rich. https://t.co/zqWkqvAqHc

Whether you’re fishing or reading a book or hugging your loved ones, an extra-cheap television or whatever isn’t better. It’s not even equal. It’s a distant, distant 47th place behind all the other things that actually make you happy and make your life a genuinely better place to inhabit.